Brave Women in "The
Hainted House"

"The Hainted House."
In Roberts, Leonard. South From Hell-fer-Sartin': Kentucky
Mountain Folk Tales. U of KY Press, 1955. Rpt. Berea, KY: The
Council of the Southern Mountains, 1964, pp. 40-41. A traveling man
leaves his wife in a house that she doesn't know is haunted. Because
she is the only one who hasn't been afraid of him, a ghost shows her
where to dig for his buried chest. She sends her cowardly husband
away when he returns in the morning. "He was afraid to come back,
and there wasn't any use for her to have him around." This is
one of four related ghost tales in this volume, section 9. The others
are about boys. Roberts gives detailed notes on these and other tales
he collected of type 326. Other ghost stories are in the section Myths
and Local Legends.

"The Hanted House." In Roberts, Leonard (collector). Nippy and the Yankee
Doodle, and Other Authentic Folk Tales from the Southern Mountains.
Berea, KY: The Council of the Southern Mountains,
1958. Roberts' note calls this the story "the most often
told one that I have collected in Appalachia. I now have twenty-five
or thirty versions. It is Type 326, The Youth Who Went Forth,
and well sets forth the two most common motifs for the presence of
ghosts on earth: they cannot rest in peace when parts of their
mortal remains have not been buried properly, and when they have left
unfinished business such as hidden money and crime unpunished."
A man who owns a large farm is killed by robbers who scatter
parts of his body around the property, but cannot find his money.
Renters say the house is haunted and move out, until a wife
home alone finds the words in her Bible needed to keep the ghost from
killing her. He names his killers, and gives his property and
hidden money to the woman and her husband after they dig up his body
parts and bury them in the cemetery. Roberts reprinted the tale
as "The Hainted House" in Old Greasybeard: Tales from the
Cumberland Gap. Illus. Leonard Epstein. Detroit: Folklore
Associates, 1969. Rpt. Pikeville, KY: Pikeville College Press,
1980. Notes in this book give many international variants and
describe the woman in Leslie County, KY who, in 1947, "told this
story in the most effective way I have ever heard."

"The Irishman." In Carter, Isobel Gordon. "Mountain White Folk-Lore: Tales from the Southern Blue Ridge." Journal of American Folklore 38 (1925): pp. 340-74 (this tale on p. 373). Available online through library services such as JSTOR. A landmark article containing Jack tales told by Jane Hicks Gentry (1863-1925) and others, recorded by Carter in 1923. Carter comments on the decline of storytelling among mountain families who used to know them better, although they had not been recorded as ballads had been. This is one of six short tales told by Susie Wilkenson of eastern Tennessee. An Irishman comes to America and is directed to a house that no one wants to stay in. While he's in bed, a woman appears to him and tells that a neighbor had murdered her while her husband was away. She tells the Irishman to swear to this story and then he is accused, confesses, and is killed.

"The Haunted House"
in Chase, Richard. American Folk Tales and Songs, and Other
Examples of English-American Tradition as Preserved in the Appalachian
Mountains and Elsewhere in the United States. Illus. Joshua
Tolford. New York: Dover, 1956, rpt. 1971. A preacher,
spending a night in a haunted house, speaks to the ghost of a murdered
woman. After giving her bones a Christian burial, he uses her finger
end-joint in the collection plate to catch her murderer. Then the
ha'nt instructs him to dig for a bag of gold under the hearthrock.
Chase notes that this tale from Wise County, VA has the basic form
of a ghost tale that has existed since 300 A.D. or earlier.

Eight tales collected
for the WPA in the section "Haunted Houses," in Virginia
Folk Legends. Ed. Thomas E. Barden. Charlottesville: U of VA
Press, 1991. "The Ghost's Little Finger Bone," similar to
Chase's tale above, contains a ghost-girl who tells a preacher how
to catch her murderer. "A Civil War haunt in an Old Log House"
involves several women in a house haunted by a murdered woman. These
two were collected by Emory L. Hamilton in Wise County, VA.

"The Story of a Boy Who Went Forth To Learn Fear"
by the Grimm Brothers. Transl. and reprinted online from the
Grimms' 2nd edition, 1819, by D. L. Ashliman. A younger son who is
too dumb to get scared at anything endures a series of frightening
events, some involving scary black cats, ghosts, and playing ninepins
with body parts. He saves a haunted castle, marries the princess and
gets a fortune, but he doesn't learn what the creeps are until his
wife pours a bucket of cold minnows over him in bed. Some incidents
are also similar to those in "Soldier
Jack."